Invading Paradise: Esopus Settlers at War with Natives, 1659, 1663

By Andrew Brink

Invading Paradise: Esopus Settlers at War with Natives, 1659, 1663 reopens and redirects debate about causes of the two Esopus Wars in what are now Kingston and Hurley, New York. Historical studies are found inadequate to explain the conflict and its genocidal outcome. If causality is ever to be reliably decided, the principal actors in this colonial drama need study. Records of aboriginals are understandably scant, while those of settlers are full enough to give impressions of their motivations and attitudes to the frontier. This study is the first to introduce as individuals the main European immigrants involved in the wars. Were they prepared for what confronted them upon acquiring native agricultural lands? Readers are invited to consider exactly what happened to bring on violence.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Xlibris US
• Release date: Jun 6, 2003
• ISBN: 9781465317629

Andrew Brink

Andrew Brink (BA, MA, Toronto; PhD, London, UK) is a retired professor of English literature at McMaster University, Hamilton, Ontario, Canada. He is also former Co-ordinator of The Humanities and Psychoanalytic Thought Program, Trinity College, University of Toronto. His books include Loss and Symbolic Repair (1977), Obsession and Culture: A Study of Sexual Obsession in Modern Fiction (1996) and The Creative Matrix: Anxiety and the Origin of Creativity (2000). Invading Paradise: Esopus Settlers at War with Natives, 1659, 1663 results from exploring genealogy and family history from the colonial period in New Netherland to westward migration into Upper Canada. He advocates accurate family “remembering”, by placing genealogical data in its historical contexts.

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Copyright © 2003 by Andrew Brink.

Cover: A Young Dutchman by Pieter Jansz. Quast (1605/6-1647). Collection of the author.

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Contents

Acknowledgements

Preface

Chapter 1

Prelude to Catastrophe

Chapter 2

Thomas Chambers: From Clabbort to Lord of the Manor

Chapter 3

Schout of Esopus: Roeloff Swartout and Eva Bradt.

Chapter 4

Soldier and Settler: Hendrick Jochemszen Schoonmaker and His Wife Elsje Jans Van Breestede

Chapter 5

Success and Strife: Tjerck Claeszen De Witt and Barbara Andries

Chapter 6

Fleeing Indians: Albert Gysbertszen Van Gorder and Aeltje Wygerts

Chapter 7

Hardship and Grief: Cornelis Barentszen Slecht and Tryntie Bos

Chapter 8

Riding Through a Storm: Evert Evertszen Pels and Jannetje Symens

Chapter 9

Facing the Unexpected: Aldert Heymanszen Roosa and Wyntje Ariens de Jong

Chapter 10

Agitating Settlers: Herman Hendrickszen Rosenkrans and Magdalena Volckerszen

Chapter 11

Improving Their Lot: Jan Gerritszen Decker and Grietje Westerkamp

Chapter 12

Stabilizing Upheaval: Willem de la Montagne and Elenora De Hooges

Chapter 13

Overcoming Perils: Lambert Huybertszen Brinck and Hendrickje Cornelisse

Chapter 14

Alcohol, Trauma and Genocide

Conclusion

Notes

Appendix 1

Bibliography

Image485.JPG

Map: "Iroquoia and its frontier" ca. 1670.

Acknowledgements

My thanks to those persons who gave generously of their time to save this book from errors and excesses. The remaining faults are mine.

Preface

When in 1857 Joshua Brink compiled a General Family Record he knew nothing of the Esopus Wars in 1659 and 1663, the second of which could easily have terminated his family. Born in 1799 in Upper Canada, Joshua had asked his father, the immigrant Nicholas, what he could remember of lineage and family history in what had become the new republic. Recollections of his grandfather, another Nicholas living in Pennsylvania and northern New York, were forthcoming, but the three prior generations in America could not be accurately named. Joshua gives the sequence as Ralph, John, Nicholas 1st, Nicholas 2nd and Nicholas 3rd, admitting that the writer cannot relate any thing definite further back than Nicholas the 2nd, his grandfather who lived from 1728 to 1804.¹ The forebears were in fact Lambert Huybertszen, Huybert Lambertszen and Thomas in Joshua’s line; Ralph is a likely mistake for Roeloff (Ralph) Swartwout, whose daughter married Huybert; there was a John in the right period, and Nicholas 1st was probably Nicholas Van Schoonhoven, a Walpack, N.J. business partner whose sister Francyntie had married Thomas Brink.

Joshua records that the paternal ancestors of the writer were from Holland, said to be tanners by occupation, were among the first emigrants to North America, landed at New York, settled in New Jersey [and] were protestant by profession. The Brinks were mainly farmers, although tanning could have been an occupation of some. This is a shaky start to what otherwise is a thorough, accurate and detailed account of Brink and other descendants in New York and Ontario from the mid-eighteenth century. Prior to Joshua’s effort, family history appears to have been by verbal transmission, with selective retention of certain persons and events but exclusion of others. I believe that the extreme peril of Lambert Huybertszen’s and Hendrickje Cornelisse’s generation was erased from memory because it was too painful. There were no honorific heroics of theirs to retain in memory, and they and their children had been lucky to remain alive.

When I realized their narrow escape of 1663, I also wondered about participation, or complicity, in conditions leading to what seemed an unjustifiable armed conflict. I was appalled by the ruthlessness with which Dutch and Huguenot settlers at Esopus went about displacing aboriginals from their traditional crop lands. True, settlers had purchased and recorded land acquisitions, but there was no appeal against their demand for ownership. A moral rationale could not be offered. To what extent had my family been involved in what, from our point of view, is colonial exploitation, with genocidal implications? When groups go to war, they admit to failure of civilized means of resolving conflicts; they may enter into a virtual suicide pact by which each side strives for death and loss of property. Everybody loses more or less severely, with lingering bitterness and wishes for revenge. It is not enough to say, what did you expect in the violent, expansionist seventeenth-century; it was happening everywhere Europeans contacted natives? Yes, but this was my own family, whose members down the generations were seen to have lived by civilized Christian values and contributed peaceably to society. Was this family founded in America upon inhumane, even criminal, events?

I needed to search beyond the rather tepid and unsatisfactory historical accounts of settlement and the two Esopus wars. Trips from Ontario, Canada to Kingston, and the especially evocative village of Hurley, New York, gave a sense of the territory—tranquil enough now, but readily re-animated by historical imagination to the era of colonial strife. It is self-indulgent to feel guilty about one’s ancestors without finding out as much as can be known of their reasons for acting as they did. Enough data had been published to make it seem that, even if more primary evidence could not be found, assembling known evidence differently might reveal something more about how settlers thought and acted. Use of published court records, land books, church records and the invaluable resources of the Senate House Archives in Kingston and the Ulster County Genealogical Society library in Hurley helped to form a more complete picture. Mainly, I thought, drawing up portraits of the principal settlers, especially schout and schepens, would illuminate motivations. I was well aware, from long experience of reading seventeenth-century English biography, how unlikely it would be to see deeply into any of these personages. Their childhoods and family experiences in Europe could not be known except in very general ways. But assembly of multiple records, in often tedious, legalistic details, nonetheless was rewarding. I do not claim to have exhausted all sources of information, but I believe that most of them were found and that the portraits are as accurate as they are ever going to be.

Interpretations have not been imposed within the biographical reports, and readers are left to judge character for themselves. Modern psycho-social insights have been used only in discussing individual and group trauma, together with excessive use of alcohol by settlers and, in turn, by natives. Some readers may object even to this saying, you can’t judge past behavior by today’s standards, but it is more true that we can’t react as though today’s psycho-social research lacks retroactive applications. I have tried to make Esopus settlers more visible, to make you see (as the novelist Joseph Conrad said of his fiction) immediately, rather than by the usual abstractions of history writing. Each portrait helps with a context for every other, although full-scale interaction is, for the most part, missing. Concern with my own ancestors recedes as the writing progresses towards the group process that produced such tragic conflicts.

The argument of Invading Paradise, if it requires one, is that this oddly assorted group of settlers were inadequate as people to succeed peaceably at the task of resettling Indian agricultural lands. They probably had no right being there in the first place, but having arrived they were too urgent about their business, and too fractious among themselves, to form any kind of lasting accord with their predecessors. Opportunities to learn from, and to integrate with, native inhabitants were lost. The settlers’ moral failure was understandably forgotten, and it is little wonder that Joshua Brink had no information about it.

Chapter 1

Prelude to Catastrophe

I do not believe . . . that there is anything barbarous or savage about [natives], except that we all call barbarous anything that is contrary to our own habits.

—Michel de Montaigne, Essays (c.1588)

About eighteen (Dutch) miles (fifty-four English) up the North River, half way between the Manhattans and Rensselaer or Beverwyck, lies a place called by the Dutch Esopus or Sypous, and by the Indians, Atharhacton. It is an exceedingly fine country there. Thereupon some Dutch families settled there who are doing very well. They hold Sunday meetings, and then one of them reads from the Postilla."—The Reverends Johannes Megapolensis and Samuel Drisius to the Classis of Amsterdam, August 5, 1657.

To the eyes of Europeans, the magnificent vistas opening before them at every bend of the Hudson River must have seemed an uninhabited paradise. The poet Jacob Steendam saw New Netherland Like’n Eden’s garden, thou noblest spot of earth/ Where bounteous Heaven ever poureth forth/ The fulness of His gifts . . . ¹ Writing to attract settlers, Adriaen Van Der Donck admitted that I am incompetent to describe the beauties, the grand and sublime works, wherewith Providence has diversified this land.² But as in Genesis, man and woman’s stay in paradise was brief as contemplation bent to temptation to eat forbidden fruit. European settlers in New Netherland brought a history of conflict with them, domination over nature and aboriginals being a by-product of competitive striving. They arrived intending no harm but, compared to aboriginals, they were aggressive and technologically equipped to dominate rather than to integrate with the natural and man-made order they found. They were invaders with plans of conquest, land ownership being an assumed right. They aspired to much more from farming and trade than the subsistence culture of the people they displaced.

From the start of European settlement paradise was threatened. The military analogy quickly became actual, with armed conflict being the result of differing assumptions and expectations of settlers and natives. Whereas the natives’ impulse was to welcome strangers and even integrate them into their way of life, the Dutch had in mind trade and commerce—a Holland on the Hudson, differing as little as possible from the thriving state at home, then in its confident Golden Age. The two Esopus Wars of 1659 and 1663 in what is now the region of Kingston, New York, represent a microcosm of the disjunction and are strong indicators of how a colonial mentality was formed from the will to dominate and from fear of what was unknown and unpredictable in a new environment.

Invading Paradise enquires into the meaning of the Esopus Wars rather than narrating and re-assessing their military events. This study asks about the states of mind and possible motivations of Dutch and Huguenot settlers who challenged natives. Primarily genealogical and biographical, it attempts the realism of portraiture. The wars, or lethal skirmishes as they might be better termed, are well portrayed by Marc B. Fried in The Early History of Kingston (1975) and by the popular writers Henri and Barbara Van der Zee in A Sweet and Alien Land: The Story of Dutch New York (1978). They draw upon nineteenth-century histories of settlement and use newly translated documentary evidence.

Nineteenth-century studies of Esopus settlement and the wars by Jonathan W. Hasbrouck, incorporated as chapters XI and XIII in Nathaniel Bartlett Sylvester’s History of Ulster County, New York (1880) and the first three chapters of Marius Schoonmaker’s The History of Kingston, New York (1888) remain valuable resources. Their historical enquiry was undoubtedly stimulated by Edmund B. O’Callaghan’s publication in the 1850s of original documents such as Captain Martin Kregier’s Journal of the Second Esopus War and Domine Blom’s Description of the Massacre at the Esopus, 1663 in The Documentary History of New York. I found especially compelling Benjamin Myer Brink’s essays on the wars in Olde Ulster: An Historical and Genealogical Magazine, 1905-1914. His view that the wars were avoidable and largely the result of Director Stuyvesant’s bad management struck a responsive chord. Sensitive and humane though Benjamin Myer Brink’s reflections on the wars may be, he did not write detailed accounts of the actors—except for a good beginning in the case of Thomas Chambers. Other genealogical and biographical contents of Olde Ulster suggested the usefulness of a continuation of his work by profiling, in as much detail as documents allow, the Esopus settlers most directly involved in relations with indigenous people. Since Brink’s time many more original records have been translated: The Kingston Papers (1976), Fort Orange Court Minutes, 1652-1660 (1990) and Fort Orange Records, 1656-1678 (2000) to mention the most important. Similarly, my own unease with how the Esopus settlement took shape in violence results from knowing an ancestral past.

New Netherland historians reliably account for commercial venturing in colonial New York, but less often portray the people themselves, the plain lives lived in the first settlements, sometimes under extreme adversity. This study attempts to see settlers as they actually were, a diverse sample of European adventurers seeking their economic betterment. Each settler being master of his own land was an attraction which could not be resisted. Settlers who brought families usually intended to stay and make a life amidst abundant resources unavailable at home. They assumed their Dutch/

Huguenot social organization and religion would stand the test of the frontier, but the view here is that the two Esopus Wars tested them to breaking point. Disorganization of settlers’ psyches and lives went deeper than has been appreciated. Fear of attack lasted long after actual native threat had been eliminated. The trauma of war produced an amnesia, a protective forgetting of terror and pain, which this study will help to lift.

To discover the human meaning of the Esopus Wars, I have selected twelve settlers and their wives who were major contributors to events and who also suffered from them. All were individualistic and adventurous, with some more driven than others to improve status and profits in the new world. In each profile of a settler and his wife and family, I try to bring out the force of their personalities, their methods of coping under adverse, sometimes life-threatening conditions, and their interpersonal rivalries which blinded them to native reactions to their presence. I have appropriated the seventeenth-century English device of the character, or prose portrait. These brief biographies of some political and literary worthies of the period are built up from scraps of more or less reliable information. Despite scouring every historical resource I could find, the settlers’ portraits are just such patchworks of fact and impression. They are the fullest reconstructions yet attempted of persons long known from the researches of genealogists and family historians. I have tried to be just as rigorous in using documentation as the best genealogists, such as David M. Riker in his Genealogical and Biographical Directory to Persons in New Netherland from 1613 to 1674. Riker’s work is invaluable in establishing families and their interconnections, and it is extensively used in this study. Its indications and suggestions as to actual patterns of life are filled out and followed from the ever-increasing supply of original documents available to researchers. I have tried to support every substantial biographical statement with a primary source and not strain credulity by overmuch interpretation. I hope to have retrieved from obscurity some seventeenth-century settlers and permit them to speak for themselves.

In the first group of characters are the officials of the Esopus settlement, comprising Wiltwyck (Kingston) and later Nieuwe Dorp (Hurley). They are Roeloff Swartwout, schout (sheriff, chief of police and prosecutor) and the schepens, or commissaries, who served under him from 1661. Prior to and during the First Esopus War of 1659, there was no court, the settlement being governed from Fort Orange/Beverwyck. On May 16, 1661, Director General Stuyvesant established an inferior court at Wiltwyck consisting of the schout and three (later four) schepens nominated by the people but approved by the Director General in New Amsterdam. They had both administrative and legal responsibility within limits, the most serious cases at Esopus being referred to the Director General and his higher court. From court minutes kept by the schout, later by a court secretary, much can be learned about the settlers themselves, their dealings, infractions of rules, grudges and challenges to each other. Attitudes to savages can often be gauged by accounts of conflicts with them. Of course the limitation of using court minutes to evaluate interacting personalities is that the cooperative and convivial aspects of life are easily missed. When looking at the conflicted, often unpleasant side of life, we should remember that there was also much neighborly help and good cheer, especially among women and their children, but also amongst the men. I do think, however, that in the first decades of settlement corrosive fear built up and was never examined for what it was. Lamentation, prayer and fasting were not sufficient to remove the fear and guilt arising from conflict with aboriginals. At best they palliated them, distracting attention from the genocide that really happened and remained the unacknowledged source of unease.

Joining Schout Swartwout were schepens Evert Pels, Aldert Heymanszen Roosa, Cornelis Barentszen Slecht (1661-2), Albert Gysbertszen (Van Gorder) and, when Slecht dropped out, Tjerck Claeszen De Witt. After June 5, 1663, Thomas Chambers and Dr. Gysbert Van Imbroch became schepens, with Pels and Roosa dropping out. A slightly later schepen, or commissary, Hendrick Jochemszen (Schoonmaker) is presented because of his leadership as lieutenant of the Burgher Guard in time of tension and war. It will be noted that as Swartwout’s fortunes slipped, and other schouts were appointed, Chambers’s star continued to rise. He comes out of this study an ambiguous friend/foe of natives and, as Lord of the Manor of Fox Hall, the de facto Esopus leader in the period of English domination. These are the formative figures whose attitudes and deeds need detailed consideration if we are to understand why there were two deadly contests with natives and fear of more conflict with them even after its possibility had been reduced to almost nothing. Documentary profiles are offered of each schepen, with the exception of Dr. Van Imbroch. Less is recorded about his short life, and essentials appear in the chapter on his brother-in-law Willem de la Montagne.

The second group of Esopus settlers, whose lives show the impact of one or both Esopus wars, is selected as representative of the surprising variety of Europeans who remade their lives in this enclave of Holland on the Hudson. This group of Huguenot, Dutch and Norwegian origin is: Willem de la Montagne and Eleanor DeHooges, Albert Gysbertszen (Van Gorder) and Aeltje Wygerts, Jan Gerretszen (Decker) and Grietje Westerkamp, Herman Hendrickszen (Rosenkrans) and Magdalena Volckerszen and, finally, Lambert Huybertszen (Brinck) and Hendrickje Cornelisse. They are chosen because the impact of the Second Esopus War is so palpable on their families and because documentation is comparatively abundant. I believe that much the same results would appear by looking at more, or different, settlers, for instance: Lewis DuBois, Mattheus Blanchan and Antony Crispell, each of whom had children, and in two cases, wives taken prisoner by Indians. Selection is invidious, and many other settlers clamor for inclusion. To increase the portraits towards inclusiveness would enrich the study while being unlikely to change the overall impression of intrusiveness and will to dominate aboriginal lands and the lives they had supported. It would be valuable to know more about settlers’ European childhoods, education and social status, but the gatherings are scant. Of particular interest are the pre-industrial agricultural initiatives of settlers at Esopus, who were primarily farmers as their descendants remained for many generations. I have tried to include as much information as possible about women, who contributed far more to settlement than has been acknowledged. Their documentation is less satisfactory than that for men, but we will see clearly the wives, mothers and their children in the debacle of The Second Esopus War.

By reanimating these settlers—a cross section of the settlement from those who remained tillers of the land to community officials—the dynamics of conflict with natives, leading to the Second Esopus War, will become clearer. The sample profiles individual men and women whose assumptions, attitudes and behaviors were at odds with the paradise which native adaptation had not much disrupted. Recognizing the debate over what edenic status natives actually had, I do not intend to idealize them or romanticize their place in nature.³ Indians too had murderous territorial strife and could exploit nature, but their impact on the wilderness was not nearly the heavy impact of Europeans.

As this study reveals, Europeans were sharply individualized personalities showing possessive individualism primed for conflict.⁴ (That they all tended to be singular beings is evidenced in Dutch portraiture and genre painting of the seventeenth century.) So intent were settlers on each others’ fortunes and misfortunes that their interactions took little account of the extraordinarily beautiful new world around them—or at least surviving records provide no evidence of such sensibility. It took a poet Steendam, and a writer Van Der Donck, to register awe at the American Eden. Of diverse origin (mainly English, Dutch, Norwegian and French, together with new English overseers after the conquest of 1664) the settlers of Esopus had one seldom stated but real objective: to displace aboriginals from traditional farming lands and to farm them by their own European methods. New Netherland Director General Pieter Stuyvesant himself had interest here, deciding that the settlement should be the colony’s primary agricultural producer. Where the natives had grown corn, beans and squash on the rich alluvial lands beneath the Catskills, settlers would add grain crops, especially wheat and rye, to support livestock brought from the Netherlands. Apple and pear trees were also brought, as were shrubs and flowers. Tobacco was appropriated from the natives and grown for export. It was a well-organized enterprise by knowledgeable and experienced immigrants, but the social consequences of agrarian invasion were fatal to Steendam’s poetic vision of paradise.

A clear sight of the aboriginal people of Esopus is lacking, and it would be unwise to either idealize them as innocent victims or denigrate them as vicious antagonists. We have some of their names and accounts by Europeans of what they said in dealing with colonial authorities, but they cannot be seen as individuals. Individualistic is exactly what they were not, in sharp contrast with the invaders. (Early modern individualism and the quest for private property seem to imply each other.) Their language, religion and customs are unrecorded, with only a description of their place in larger native organization available to us. This description, derived from treaties, is a European approximation of long lost territorial habitation. The Minsis chieftaincies included the Esopus, or Warranawonkong, people whose territory included that settled by Dutch and Huguenots. As E. M. Ruttenber writes, Their principal castle was in the Shawangunk country, although a very considerable one was on the Esopus river, known as Wiltmeet.⁵ Some of their chiefs are remembered by name: Preummaker (the oldest and best chief) and Papequanaehen, both killed in The Second Esopus War. When Director Stuyvesant made peace in 1664, the sachem was Sewackenamo, with chiefs Onackatin and Powsawagh in attendance. Ruttenber mentions that another Minsi chieftaincy, the Waoranecks, also participated in the Esopus Wars.

Settlers’ pressure on aboriginal farming lands must have been intense for Esopus natives to have violated their instructions of 1660, following the First Esopus War, by the Minsi sachem, Onderis Hocque: Ye must not renew this quarrel; neither kill horse nor cow, nor steal any property. Whatever ye want, ye must purchase or earn. Live with the Dutch as brothers. Ye cause us and the Mohawks great losses. This is not your land. It is our land. Therefore repeat not this [war], but throw down the hatchet. Tread it so deep into the earth that it shall never be taken up again. The Esopus sachem, Sewackenamo, ceremonially enacted burying the hatchet and called for lasting peace. A formal treaty with binding provisions was signed, Thus done and concluded, near the concentration of Esopus, under the blue sky of heaven, in the presence of the Hon. Martin Kregier, burgomaster of the city of Amsterdam in New Netherland; Oloff Stevenszen van Cortland, old burgomaster; Arent van Curler, commissary of the colonie of Rensselaerswyck, and all the inhabitants of Esopus, both Christians and Indians, on the 15th of July, 1660.⁶ But Director Stuyvesant refused to return exiled Indian prisoners and failed to deliver promised presents expected by Indians as tokens of bargaining in good faith, while settlers’ encroachments on aboriginal farms increased. No diplomatic protocol was devised to prevent another and worse armed conjunction. When Captain Kregier returned, it was to rescue Christian prisoners from enraged war-making Indians.

Esopus settlers were practical people, obligated to fair returns to their company sponsors, the West India Company. They had no utopian ideology to compare with William Penn’s when designing the peaceable kingdom of Pennsylvania. Scarcely informed about aboriginals (de Wilden, or wild people), the hard-working settlers were unskilled in native languages and unprepared for diplomacy. As some were illiterate and could only sign with a mark, Adriaen Van Der Donck’s introductory and generalized Of the Manners and Peculiar Customs of the Natives of New Netherlands was lost on them. Matter-of-fact and tolerant, Van Der Donck nevertheless regretted how resistant the heathens were to Christian teachings of a judgmental God. But he also reports the natives asking, if you have such a God, how come so many of you are thieves, drunkards and evil-doers? Van Der Donck observes: Very seldom do they adopt our religion, nor have there been any political measures taken for their conversion.⁷ Native elders, however, wished their children better informed of the settlers’ language and Christian profession. The cultural gulf was enormous, and not enough is